Email from Ki

I just gave out an ad for a roommate and everyone is mailing me asking if I am 420 friendly and I don't know what it is!!

Spa Women

Earlier this week...

Spa Woman #1: I'm here for a facial. Eating all that greasy food over the weekend made me break out something awful.

Spa Woman #2: I'm here for a massage. Chasing after the kids all weekend long killed my back. I need a break.

Spa Woman #3: I'm here for a brazilian wax. After spending the long weekend with my in-laws, these will be the most relaxing 15 minutes in the last 4 days.

Office Hours

Why isn't anybody showing up for my office hours? This is a really hard problem set, people!

Acknowledgements

The paper is done. It's in the final stages of revision. Before returning to all the other work that I've been neglecting (sorry blog, like Wildfire, you are on the backburner), I present my acknowledgements page.

Thank you to Professor Howard Budin, whose class on "Computers, Problem Solving, and Cooperative Learning" showed me that there can be a better way.

Thank you to Professor Ellen Meier, whose class on "Technology and School Change" provided the necessary motivation to fight the good fight.

Thank you to Professor Henry Pollak, who taught me a very difficult subject in mathematics with great fun and creativity.

Thank you to Daniel Medina, who has been proof-reading my papers, debugging my code, and correcting my problem sets since freshman year of college, and who happens to be better, in every measurable metric, than anyone else I know.

Am I forgetting anyone?

Progress

And we are done with the new Unify. It's just like the old Unify, only, uh... less ugly.

Meta....not.

I am purposefully omitting any mention of metacognition. That might be a bad idea, seeing what a trendy academic buzzword it is. But still. So far, some 15 pages, and not a single reference to metacognition.

Update: Metacognition is starting to seem like a really good idea at this point.

Update: I have to be fairly meticulous to keep up with this. How about “self-regulated learning” instead? Is that cheating?

Productive.

The reason why I am not writing is because I am making ridiculous progress on the wiki paper. The acknowledgements page is done! No, I joke, I joke. I am feeling like this can happen. This deadline will not make that delightful whooshing sound that Mr. Adams and I so much enjoy.

I hope that everyone had a splendid Thanksgiving.

Don't go to the mall.

Once, when my feet were bare, and I had not the means of obtaining shoes I came to the chief of Kufah in a state of much dejection, and saw there a man who had no feet. I returned thanks to God and acknowledged his mercies, and endured my want of shoes with patience.

- Sadi, The Gulistan

For the record

You only like me for my blog. You only like me for these little tidbits of elitist wit and sarcasm. And the occasional math problem. And the occasional Tom Lehrer/Henry Rollins/Jean Piaget reference. I am nothing but an RSS feed to you. So it goes.

Time to panic

I have a strict deadline of December 1st for the wiki paper. I am, at best, half way done. I haven't finished any analysis yet, and am not even done with a literature review. All I have is a sweet tribute to Eric Raymond, and enough references to probabilistic systems to befuddle any layman. Major freak out. If I don't reply to email next week ....

Weekly exchange

Daniel (while looking over my Java code): Uh... how do you sleep in Java?
Me: Oooh! I know this one! You have to sit in the back of the room and make sure that the teacher doesn't see you!

Every Wednesday, we have a conversation very much along those lines.

Jury Duty Over

I made it out without being picked. I am not sure what kind of people get picked. I couldn't figure it out. I am clever, and always tell the truth. I am also well educated, and have a higher moral purpose. But maybe that's what they don't want. It seems like all the clever people got rejected.

Anyway, they let me go with a don't call us, we'll call you. I can't say for sure, but I think this is how one feels when being turned down by the opposite sex.

Blogging Jury Duty

Prosecutor: What do you think about marijuana?
Me: I think that it should be legalized and taxed heavily.
Prosecutor: You are excused.

Back to the jury assembly room. 1.5 hours to go.

Blogging Jury Duty

Anyone who is no longer a resident of the borough of Brooklyn please come up to the front of the room. I repeat, if you are no longer a resident of the borough of Brooklyn, come up to the front of the room! Alright, now all of you, go to the clerk's office and write a fifty page essay about why anyone would be so stupid as to leave Brooklyn. Don't laugh, I'm serious.

Blogging Jury Duty

Didn’t get disqualified on the first run-through. Got laughed-at, actually. I’m not sure what’s going on right now. We are all just kind of sitting around, waiting. Not sure for what.

I must say, though, that the efficiency of this place makes the Registrar’s office seem like a Six Sigma teaching example.

Blogging Jury Duty

You don't have to speak English fluently. You don't have to know how to read or right. Just as long as you have a general awareness of the English language... that's ok. We'll take you.

Blogging Jury Duty

From 320 Jay Street, the criminal division of the Kings County Supreme Court...

1. I've been here for 25 minutes, and I've already been told to "sit down and shut up" four times, by a very large, angry looking man, who has in his possession at least one automatic projectile weapon.

2. The best looking people off-campus are much much uglier than the ugliest people on campus.

3. This place is full of criminals!!

4. Just realized: Polytechnic is right across the street. Should've tried to make lunch with John Grogan. Probably too late now.

5. Surprisingly, they don't give you refreshments in the jury room.

6. They have wireless, but I can't find an outlet. Will have to do another sweep of the room.

The best job in education?

During lunch, I was talking jobs with a soon-to-be PhD graduate who is defending next semester. He claims that he would prefer a teaching position at Stuyvesant High School over a tenure-track position at any Ivy League college. Now, I think that is a bit extreme.

Sure, Stuyvesant is the second best high school in New York City, but tenure at an Ivy is pretty much the holy grail of any academic. Plus, you would need to either win the lottery or marry someone very rich if you plan on paying off four years of undergrad and eight years of full-time grad study on a NYC public school teacher salary. His counter-claim is that at Stuyvesant, you would get to deal with a class of people far smarter than the "spoiled brats" you typically run into on an Ivy campus. In addition, (he claims that) if you are interested in teaching, you won't find a sweeter deal than you would at Stuy, since any good university would expect you to do a great amount of research and publish an even greater amount of papers, in order to earn your keep. I almost agree with him, although I don't know why you would want to go for second best, when number one is just a few short stops away, in the Bronx.

So the question is - do you go the traditional course and aim for tenure at a university, and put up with all the grunt ... err... research work that goes along with it. Or, do you try for a teaching job at a top high-school?

ISC

When Internet chess isn't enough to fail grad school...

80's cinema in conversation

Having conversations with me involving references to American movies from the 80s is generally a very bad idea, as is apparent in the following example.

- You know, I'm just like the guy in that "Pretty in Pink" movie.
- Oh yea?
- Yea... I'm friendly and goofy, but girls like you just want to be my friends, they don't want to date me. They want to date the cool rich guy.
- I have no idea what you are talking about.
- You know, "Pretty in Pink!" That movie...
- Was that with Steve Guttenberg and the robot? I love that movie!
- No no no! Steve Guttenberg wasn't in that one!
- Oh. If Steve Guttenberg wasn't in it, I didn't see it.

Happy Election Day!

Now go vote.

Frid....err...Monday math solution

The answer to last week's "Lockers" problem: only perfect squares stay open. This can be seen with experimentation. The reason why this is true is due to parity - the number of divisors of n is odd iff n is a perfect square.

Daniel, of course, saw this as an exercise in programming, and wrote a Perl script.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $CLOSED = q{.};
my $OPENED = q{O};
my $NUM_LOCKERS = 80;
my %lockers;
# Set all the lockers to be cloesd
map { $lockers{$_} = $CLOSED } 1 .. $NUM_LOCKERS;
for my $n ( 2 .. $NUM_LOCKERS ){
for my $i ( $n .. $NUM_LOCKERS ) {
# Every nth locked => divisible by n
if ( $i % $n == 0 ) {
# Toggle the state of the locker
$lockers{$i} = $lockers{$i} eq $OPENED ? $CLOSED : $OPENED;
}
}
print "$n:\t", join ( q{}, @lockers{1..$NUM_LOCKERS} ), "\n";
}

I didn't get a chance to blog this on Friday, on account of my having a life. Sorry. The weekly math problem is turning out to be too much of a commitment, it seems (regardless of how helpful these may prove during the occasional job interview). I'll post problems as they come up, but I don't think that I can keep to a schedule.

Постой, паровоз!

Юрий Никулин и Георгий Вицин - Постой, паровоз! (1965)

A translation is both impossible, and completely unnecessary.

Need test users

I am working on a research project to evaluate the potential of using wikis in math education. I am looking for some math teachers (at any grade level, or college) who would be willing to become test users. This would entail using the wiki that I set up for at least one week - navigating the pages, and trying to generate content on various topics. After that, they will be asked to take a brief survey.

If you, or anybody you know, are interested in participating, please email me with the words "Math Wiki Research" in the subject line. (Don't reply in the comments). If we don't know each other, please have the email come from some official-sounding domain.